Facebook: Open Compute Has Saved Us Over US$1 Billion in Three Years

Building, running and maintaining data centers can be extremely costly and this is especially so for a company like Facebook which has huge computing and storage demands. So in 2011, Facebook started Open Compute, an initiative to openly share designs of its own custom designed data center products that are used in their data centers.

The initiative has proved to be very successful and now counts companies like Intel, AMD, Bloomberg, IBM and even Microsoft as its members.

At the recent Open Compute Summit, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, also commented that it was because of this initiative that the company was able to save over US$1 billion on infrastructure costs. That aside, the initiative has also helped Facebook cut down its carbon foot print and drastically reduce its electricity bills.

Zuckerberg also said, “In just the last year we’ve saved the equivalent amount of energy of 40,000 homes in a year, and saved the amount of emissions equivalent to taking 50,000 cars off the road for a year.”

It is good to know that not only is Facebook helping people stay in touch with one another and finding long-lost friends, they are also doing their bit for the environment.